This year marks the 50th Anniversary of the publication of the pentagon papers. The pentagon papers were a government study commissioned in 1967.

The purpose of the study was to track US involvement in Vietnam. The study was classified, but in 1969, one of the men who’d help write the study, Daniel Ellsberg, secretly began photocopying it in order to release it to the public. He thought the public deserved to know what was in it. In March 1971, The New York Times receives copies of the study and begins going through them.

A little over two months later, the first article is published by the New York Times about the Pentagon Papers. The Justice Department then files an injunction against the New York Times in order to bar them from publishing any more classified material. When the Times is stopped, the Washington Post takes over the story, and the government soon takes them to court with the Times.

But on June 30, 1971, the Supreme Court votes in a 6-3 decision that the news organizations are allowed to publish whatever material they want, because of the right to free speech in the First Amendment.

50 years later, this legacy of this decision lives on in the modern news world.